Brittany Higgins’ Shocking Claim to Journalist About Her Relationship with Linda Reynolds
Brittany Higgins felt poisoned and told the journalist who broke the story of her alleged rape in the parliament building that Senator Linda Reynolds “hated” her.
The senator is suing her former aide Ms Higgins, who is defending the claim, over a series of social media posts containing alleged falsehoods that she says have damaged her reputation.
Excerpts from journalist Samantha Maiden’s interview with Ms Higgins for her 2021 article were played during the defamation trial in Perth on Wednesday, as Senator Reynolds’ lawyer Martin Bennett concluded his case.
“She just avoided me. She avoided having her picture taken with me, I was toxic. She hated me,” Ms Higgins told Maiden during the recorded interview.
“She’s worked her whole life to eventually become (Secretary of Defense) and I thought, in her first two weeks… some little girl she doesn’t know gets attacked in her office and she hates it, she hated me.”
Ms Higgins also spoke to Maiden about a meeting she had with Senator Reynolds and her then chief of staff Fiona Brown in the days after she was allegedly raped in 2019.
“Her standard lines about how sick she felt and ‘I’m shocked’ … and then it turned into … ‘this is what we go through as women,’” Higgins said.
“And she said, ‘If you decide to go to the police, we will support you in doing so, but we need to know well in advance.'”
Brittany Higgins (pictured) said she was ‘toxic’ to Linda Reynolds in an interview with the journalist who broke the story of her alleged rape in Parliament House
‘She was actually quite nice, as were she and Fiona… I didn’t feel like it was an honest conversation,… I was the most junior member of staff and… she didn’t know me and she didn’t like me and I was just a problem to her.’
Ms. Higgins told the reporter that she believed the senator was “ticking a box” during the meeting.
“I felt like they needed to have this conversation with me to be able to officially say that ‘we told her she could go to the police,’ but once Linda Reynolds had that conversation, she never spoke to me about it again,” she said.
Ms Higgins told Maiden that the ‘strange moment was when Linda decided to finally talk to me about the incident. She took me to her ministerial office (where the alleged rape took place)’.
“That was the first time I went back there. So I was sitting there having a meeting about my choices, about what had just happened to me,” she said.
‘I’m sure she said a lot of nice things, but I only knew the bank. I was there all alone with Fiona and Linda and the bank.
“I thought maybe they just hadn’t thought of it.”
Asked why the article was published during a parliamentary sitting week, Maiden replied that Ms Higgins wanted it to have “impact”.
“She gave me the impression that her motivation was altruistic. She wanted to bring about reforms to the parliamentary workplace … was anxious and worried that it would be a one-hit wonder,” Maiden said, testifying via audiovisual link flanked by three lawyers.
Mrs Reynolds (pictured) is suing Mrs Higgins and her husband David Sharaz over comments she claims are untrue and have damaged her reputation.
Messages from Mrs Higgins’ husband David Sharaz to Maiden before the interview and after the story was published were read to the Supreme Court of Western Australia.
“She’s going to come out with the story and it’s going to be hard. It’s going to be big,” he wrote in one of the letters.
“She had a Me Too incident and the party covered it up. Please keep that between us,” Mr Sharaz said in another.
“She’s making a plan for you.”
After the story broke, Mr. Sharaz sent: “It’s a weird story. Journalism cap on. What a bloody scoop.”
Asked if Ms Higgins had ever said she wanted to bring down “the Morrison government” or Senator Reynolds, Maiden replied in the negative.
The trial continues on Thursday with testimony from former Australian Federal Police Deputy Commissioner Leanne Close.
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